Oh, no doubt...if they didn't first notice it in their iTunes library, most people learned about the record either from the ad, or from an article they read about it (or the backlash to it). So to the extent anyone was exposed to U2's music from the ad, it's all good.
I'm still wondering how all this plays out for Apple. Right now, aside from a bunch of bad press, all they've gotten for their 100mil is a spike in sales from U2's back catalogue and no doubt a lot of traffic in the iTunes store. Is that worth 100mil? Probably not, so there's clearly more to this deal.
And as I understand it, the cost of making the ad, along with running it all over the world, is part of that 100mil, so how much U2 actually sees of it is anyone's guess. The big money for them is obviously in the tour, but U2 does care about what people say about them, unfortunately, so it's hard to think this isn't impacting them on some level.
Do they have their precious "relevance" again? For the moment, it would seem (though notoriety is probably a better term in this case) . We'll see if anyone is talking about U2 in a couple weeks.
